A picture is worth a thousand words

I'm standing inside the bedroom here. That's the sky you see. The grey dusty debris was waist-deep before the disaster recovery people came. It also had tree branches in it. My buddy Noel from church took the photo the morning of the move, Sunday.

But that was only one room and the rest of the house was fine, though the night the great tree fell (two and a half feet in diameter, that tree trunk!) we cleared every last thing out of the two adjoining rooms right away because of concern that the roof and ceiling would collapse there too. As it turns out, they did not.

The t-shirt, as FranIAm has noted, says "There are two means of refuge in the world: music and cats." (Albert Schweitzer.)

With apologies to dog people, who know that dogs are equally a means of refuge (or more, I know, I know, but I am a cat person).

The tree, by the way, did not fall because of lightning or a big storm. Apparently what happened is that at the end of two days of steady but sometimes soft rain following a period of drought, the nearby pond and a little gully or ravine overflowed and loosened the soil around this big live tree, and boom, onto the house (and onto another half a tree which also went whomp on the house) it went.

P.S. Spoke with Mimi in Louisiana last night. They lost water. Not fun. Compared to what Mimi and her family and so many neighbors have had with displacement and loss of power and now water (at the place to which they relocated, not their original home!), I have just been on a picnic.